While I searched for the George Orwell book ‘Homage to Catalonia’ at the library I found this piece, Coming Up for Air. The cover of the book shows a pint of beer, and the back cover tells you that the book is about a middle-aged fat man, who has got fed up with everything. He neither loves his wife nor his annoying children. George Bowling is also afraid. The year is 1939 and the forthcoming war is in the air. He is afraid of Hitler and Stalin, he fears the future which will include tyranny, food queues and secret police.

One day, by mere accident he begins to think about his childhood in the little village Lower Binfield, in the days before the World War I. After a short presentation this is what the first half of the book is about, he’s describing how the world was in 1913 and to the Great War. Now, if you aren’t very fond of fishing this could be a bit boring to read. At least I thought so, but you will the main thing. George Bowling loves his past and his life as a boy in the country.



Comparing to the description of his life nowadays with a boring wife, growing waist and annoying kids it seems like paradise to him and to you as a reader. He tells detailed information from the art of fishing. There is one little pool he recalls where he once saw some great carps swimming around. He tells us why he didn’t catch it, he grown up a bit, met women, joined the army and other trivial things. Now he decides that he will go back to the good old days, escape back to Lower Binfield, and he’s going to get the carps. Eventually he got away, told his wife a lie about a business trip and got vacation from his insurance salesman job.

“I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air!”

Of course Lower Binfield had changed, he hadn’t been there for twenty years. Factories, workers and cars had swallowed the place up.







He didn’t recognize anyone at the streets. His former home, a small shop where his father worked had got into a teashop. As a last try to have something from his past he drives out of town to search for the pool. But even that area is exploited, his pool has gone into a rubbish bin for the residents in the area, filled up with tin cans. He gives up and returns home to face his wife who has found out that he hadn’t been on a business trip. She believes that he has been spending money at women, and he doesn’t have the energy to try to convince her that she’s wrong. Why should she have believed him? In their middle-class world in their nice little suburbs people don’t escape, especially not for fishing. You just don’t.

This book is about many things, it’s a mixture of stories. It’s about the forthcoming war, the dreary middle-age life, the desire to escape somewhere. The small parts of the book which describe the war are very pessimistic, George knows that he can’t do anything about it and he knows that there will be tyranny, secret polices and so on.



This book was written several years before his bestsellers 1984, and Animal Farm. But you can see this book as a preview of the dystrophies. At one moment in the book George is listening to an anti-fascist speaker, and it’s a nice part.

“It´s a picture of himself smashing people´s faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of
course. I know that´s what he was seeing. It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him. Smash! Right in the middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That´s what´s in his mind, waking and ....

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